Five Points was the most economically downtrodden neighborhood of all of New York. When starving Irish fleeing the Famine washed up in New York in 1848, it was a short walk to the miserable overcrowded dwellings in the neighborhood. The weak, sick refugees were cast into a slum that was built on a landfilled pond on whose shores the city’s slaughterhouses stood. When the buildings began to sag as they settled in the soft ground, anyone who could afford to live somewhere else moved. Filling in the abandoned space were immigrants and blacks. 1
Five Points at the time of the Civil War
During the 1830s and 1840s, nativists tried to violently push out the Irish, but the Irish pushed back. In an era of New York history when mob violence was a part of civic life, fights involving dozens or even hundreds of combatants roiled the streets. 2
By 1855, the immigrants had a firm hold on the neighborhood. Only 28% of the people living there were native-born, 52% were born in Ireland, 11% were German and 3% were Italian and about the same number were black. Roughly half of the Germans were Jews. During the middle of the 19th Century there were more Jewish congregations in Five Points than in the rest of the city combined. 3
This painting from before the war shows the racial intermixing of Five Points life.
Most of the Irish came from just three counties, Kerry, Cork and, the largest group, Sligo. Nearly all of the Sligo Irish came from two plantations owned by wealthy British landlords. Decades earlier, the landlords had taken title to the land once owned by the indigenous Irish. The Irish farmer then rented the land he farmed from the landlord. Almost all the earnings of the farmer went to pay the landlord. Farmers were reduced to eating nothing but potatoes three times a day.4
The land rental system already left the Sligo farmers malnourished before the potato blight destroyed their crops. When the Famine hit in 1846, the Sligo farmers began to die off quickly. To rid himself of the starving, the landowner, Lord Palmerston, began shipping his tenants first to Canada and then to New York. Canadian inspectors compared the conditions on Palmerston’s ships to those prevailing in the slave trade. 5
South Street was the principal landing place for immigrants in the 1850s and 1860s. Under the current Brooklyn Bridge, the docks along South Street provided employment to many Five Pointers.
Many of the Kerry Irish were from a single estate, that of the Marquis of Lansdowne. The New York Herald said the immigrants from that estate were ”the very picture of Despair, misery, disease and want…ejected without mercy and shipped for America…It is inhuman, and yet it is an act of indiscriminate and wholesale expatriation committed by the President of the Council of Her Majesty Queen Victoria.” Many of these new arrivals died before they ever got beyond the Five Points. 6
In many cases, only the father of the family came to America. He tried to live as cheaply as possible, knowing that spending an extra dollar for lodging or entertainment would steal the nourishment his children needed to survive in an Ireland where 15 % of the population was dying of starvation. To send remittances home, the Irish soon created the Emigrant Bank. Life-saving money could now safely be transmitted to Ireland for food, to save the farm, or for passage to America. 7
The Five Points in the Life of the Immigrant: A. Ships from Europe carried immigrants to South Street where they landed. B. After 1855, immigrants walked to Castle Garden (The Battery) where they could meet friends or buy train tickets. C. Newcomers from Ireland and elsewhere would often obtain their first shelter in Five Points. The Five Points was in the city’s 6th Ward. D. The Five Points was so close to City Hall that its politically active, and often angry, residents posed a threat to the city’s political elite. E. America’s publishing industry was centered at Park Row, which meant that what happened in Five Points would be read about everywhere in America. F. The physical proximity of Five Points to Wall Street made its labor radicalism a threat to America’s owning class.
Sensational nativist newspapers painted the Five Points as a nest of thieves and murderers. But the residents were for the most part hard-working men and women trying to deal with the trauma of seeing their friends and family die from starvation, and then being forced to immigrate to a sometimes hostile new world. There were few murders in the neighborhood and most arrests were for what would now be called disorderly conduct.8
The nativist press also gleefully described the “sexual promiscuity” of the Irish Five Pointers, and in particular the frequency of the Irish sleeping with or marrying African American men and women. In fact, with the Irish outnumbering blacks by 15 to 1 there was little opportunity for “race mixing”, however, Irish women were more likely to bear mixed-race babies than any other group of women in the city. .9
While outsiders saw a great mixing of peoples, in fact there was significant segregation. For example, most people from Sligo lived in apartment buildings where only other Sligo families lived. German Jews tended to live with other Jews. However, with the streets so crowded, cross ethnic friendships and relations naturally occurred. Dance competitions between Irish and black Five Pointers, where dancers from each group adopted the others moves led to a combination of African-style dancing with Irish step dancing that is now called tap dance.10
The largest group of workers among the Five Points Irish were day laborers who had nothing to sell but their labor. Men and women of all nationalities were in the needle trades, the lowest-paid of the semi-skilled occupations. Many of the so-called Five Points riots were in fact strikes by needle workers desperate for a few more cents a day in pay.11
Irish fish mongers were commonly heard on the streets of the Five Points calling out “My clams I want to sell today, the best of clams from Rock-away.” Irish who put away a little money would open a grocery or a grocery-groggery where a drink could be had while shopping. The most prosperous would open a saloon, not just a drinking hall, but a center of working-class male culture. A popular saloon-keeper could parlay his renown into political power in the neighborhood. 12
Bottle Alley at Five Points two decades after the war. This was in the heart of the neighborhood’s Sligo community.
In an age when women were expected to stay at home, Irish women worked as seamstresses and servants, they operated boardinghouses, and they were bookbinders, boxmakers, and artificial flower-makers. While Irish women formed the largest segment of domestic workers, one-in-ten ads specified that applicants must be “Protestant” or “American.” An ad seeking a housekeeper announced “WOMAN WANTED:-To do general housework…any color or country will answer except Irish.”13
The Five Points also became known as New York’s prostitution district. Men ranging from sailors disembarking at South Street to wealthy Uptowners slumming came to the neighborhood for commercialized sex. In fact, the term “slumming” originated in Five Points. 14
Most Five Points sex workers were Irish women in their late teens or early twenties. Most stayed in the sex trade for a few months or a couple of years. In most cases they entered the trade when a male protector, typically a father, died, often in a work-related accident. The resort of Irish women to prostitution was used by the nativist press to show the degeneracy of the Irish while the fact that their customers were often native born men of the respectable class went unremarked upon. 15
For all the difficulties the Irish immigrants of the Five Points faced, it is significant that they sacrificed every penny to try to bring their families over to live there. In almost every case, life in America’s worst slum was better than starvation in Ireland. Letters home promised that America was “the best country in the world.” The promise of America kept the immigrants coming, and when war broke out loyalty to this new land led thousands to enlist in the neighborhood’s Irish and German military companies. 16
Five Points Map A. The original location of the Five Points was purposely destroyed by city planners a century ago in a move to eradicate the neighborhood. The modern Court complex called Foley Square was built over the destroyed southern portion of Five Points and parks were placed on its northern side. The area where Columbus Park is located was once a thriving black neighborhood which survived until the riots. B. Mulberry Bend, where the famous street turns, was the most notorious red light district in the city. At the time of the war’s outbreak there was at least one brothel in each building on the Bend. C. Collect Pond Park memorializes the pond and swamp that were imperfectly filled in to create the landfill that became Five Points. D. Chatham Square, now the heart of Chinatown, was the eastern boundary of Five Points. E. The Bowery was the center of the working class entertainment district. The intermixture of young men and women here gave rise to America’s first “youth culture.” They had their own music, slang, and ways of dancing and dressing. Nativist gangs from north of the Five Points sometimes went Paddy Hunting by this invasion route. F. Transfiguration Church is New York’s ancient immigrant parish. Since 1853 the 200 year old church has served the changing immigrant communities. Today it offers mass in English, Cantonese and Mandarin.
Video: A short look at the gangs of the Five Points
Resource:
A walking tour of the Five Points
Sources:
1. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 is a non-fiction book by historians Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace (1998); The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America by Barnet Schecter (2007); The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1990; Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum by Tyler Anbinder published by Simon and Schuster (2001); The Tiger: The Rise And Fall Of Tammany Hall by Oliver E. Allen published by De Capo Press 1993.
Published in the Immigrants’ Civil War 2013
